Guest column: Louisiana is the world's prison capital

As Congress debates daily about ways to cut expenses and our national debt gets higher and higher our prisons get fuller and fuller.

You'll be amazed to learn that we have 5 percent of the world's population but have 25 percent of the prisoners.

More than 1.5 million Americans are in prisons. Another million are in county or city jails.

That means more than 1 percent of Americans are in jail.

An Aug. 15 report to the Louisiana Sentencing Commission, Department of Public Safety and Corrections Secretary James LeBlanc said state and local prisons "lock up 860 people per 100,000. The national average is 540 per 100,000," making Louisiana lead the nation in the percentage of its citizens behind bars.

The Louisiana prison population has doubled in last 20 years. Louisiana now has 40,000 incarcerated inmates - 59 percent for nonviolent crimes - and another 70,000 people under supervision.

According to a story in the Times-Picayune. "The hidden engine behind the state's well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt."

There's no doubt in my mind that most of the people in jail deserve to be there.

But 59 percent of these people are serving long sentences for nonviolent crimes? Are these long sentences to keep the jails full?

There's got to be a way to train these people in some sort of trade and get them back out in society earning their own way.

I was at a local quick oil change shop the other day sitting in the waiting room where a TV had the news on. The news story was about how unhappy some prisoners were about their living conditions.

An elderly Cajun lady sitting next to me said, "They should be out plowing the fields. They should be working every day on our farms and roads. They should pay for what they did."

Famous Phoenix, Ariz., Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who keeps his prisoners out on the desert in tents and feeds them bologna sandwiches, says, "If you don't like my jail, don't come back."

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Guest column: Louisiana is the world's prison capital

As Congress debates daily about ways to cut expenses and our national debt gets higher and higher our prisons get fuller and fuller.